According to Trulia, men have 7% more homes for sale than women.
Yet women's listings are 15% more expensive...
I am wondering whether this is a site glitch, or a major move to compete with Craigslist, but rental posting on Backpage appears to be free at the moment...
Rental posts typically cost a dollar on Backpage, either in apts by owner (no brokers), apts broker fee, or apts broker no fee. Yet today, everything in the rental section seems free.
This is a completely different model than Craigslist, that allows owners to post for free, and charges brokers $7-10 per post to brokers... (and enforces everything rather loosely and randomly)
Apartment Search from Walk Score from Walk Score on Vimeo.
Commuting is expensive and time spent sitting in traffic is lost forever. Here are our favorite commuting stats:
- Over three quarters of home shoppers rate being within a 30 minute commute to work as important. (Source: National Association of Realtors)
- Commuters waste 4.2 billion hours and 2.8 billion gallons of gas in traffic per year. (Source: Texas Transportation Institute)
- The average American spends over $9,000 per year on their car. This is the equivalent of a $135,000 mortgage and the second largest expense for most households, costing more than food, clothing and health care. (Source: AAA)
To get started, visit walkscore.com/apartments and enter your work (or school) address, select your preferred mode of transportation, and tell us how long you’re willing to commute.
Apartment listings from craigslist are automatically sorted by estimated commute time and can be further filtered by Walk Score, price and size.
And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, we’ve integrated links to MyNewPlace and ForRent.com to search their national databases for nearby rental listings.
“Access to public transit and minimizing commute times are high-priority, quality of life issues for many renters. We’re very pleased to offer Walk Score users access to MyNewPlace’s extensive inventory of apartments and rental homes in virtually every neighborhood throughout the U.S.,” said Mark Moran, MyNewPlace SVP of Marketing
From WalkScore Blog
My post today on the OMG Blog.
Ok, so perhaps I am just a bit excited about my new Android phone, but I really like this new app from Trulia. We work with Trulia frequently for advertising and listings, and although listings in New York City are a bit flooded by brokers (just check out all the listings with the "Address Not Disclosed"), Trulia remains one of the best listing websites out there. The coolest feature is the location-based search. I work on 23rd street near Madison Square Park, and now I can search the Trulia database for rental listings near my office just by turning on my GPS. And, of course I can filter by rent, beds and baths, square footage and a few other features.
Trulia has typically been a much more sales (listing) oriented site, but New York City is a far more rental-driven real estate market, topping the list of Trulia's Rent vs. Buy Index. But with this new app, exclusively dedicated to rentals, Trulia appears to be focusing a bit more attention on the rental side of the market. And we really look forward to any new tools that enhance a user's search for an apartment.
From the App Description:
Trulia - For Rent: find homes or apartments, share notes and photos - on the go!
Designed specifically for apartment-hunters on the go, Trulia - For Rent takes all of the pain out of finding your next place to live. Quickly find homes for rent or the apartments you like, share notes and photos with your roommates, and stay on top of what’s new on the market. Find your next rental on Trulia!
FEATURES:
• Personalize your search - Quickly find properties you like by GPS or location, get rid of the ones you don’t
• Remember what you liked (or didn’t) about the place - Take notes and photos, and also share them easily with roommates and family
• Never miss out on another rental - Sign up for email alerts right from your phone to know when new properties become available
• Quickly see what’s new - Marker colors help show you what properties you haven’t seen yet
• Find open houses near you and easily add them to your calendar
• Find properties using voice-based search – Just say the city, # of beds and bath, and price range
It’s not enough for pioneering social bookmarking site Delicious to get acquired (twice). No, VHT just had to go ahead and buy Dwellicious, an oddly named service that enables people to bookmark, tag and organize real estate properties online in the same vein.
The acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, makes a lot of sense. VHT provides technology and services for marketing real estate online, and will integrate Dwellicious into its ImageWorks online marketing platform to provide brokerage clients with a tool for communicating with home buyers.
Dwellicious uses social bookmarking to help home buyers share their favorite properties on Facebook, Twitter or other social media services. Buyers can organize, monitor and compare listings, make notes, add tags, and share and discuss properties with friends, family and real estate professionals.
VHT ImageWorks is used by more than 100,000 real estate professionals across the United States.
via techcrunch.com
What changes have taken place since Zillow acquired Postlets in April?
For one, last month we developed the ability for real estate agents, sellers, property managers, and landlords to post for-sale and for-rent listings directly from Zillow to Craigslist — for free!
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that the Postlets Pro program is now free. That’s right — we are opening up this program, which was previously a paid, subscription-only program, to everyone, for free!
That means that starting today, all new for-rent and for-sale listings on Postlets are free and will include:
- up to 18 large photos
- a rich listings template with multiple tabs
- the ability to embed community information (i.e. Walk Score, school data)
- video capabilities
Previously, these enhanced listing features were only available to paying Postlets Pro subscribers. And, of course, Postlets is still committed to listing syndication, which distributes your listings across 13 real estate and social media websites.
Postlets now has multiple tabs for richer property information
Large photo display of up to 18 photos
Real estate agents, landlords, and property managers, we hope you are as excited about this announcement as we are! Start uploading your for-rent and for-sale listings to Postlets today, and continue to look to Zillow for innovative tools and resources to market your listings and grow your business.
via zillow.com
UNTIL recently, real estate brokers in New York City rarely shared information about one another’s listings. As a result, buyers had no way of knowing whether their agent was showing them every property available, and sellers wondered whether their homes were getting the exposure necessary to secure the best deal.
Neil Binder, the president of Bellmarc Realty, says its VOW will allow property comparisons.
Companies like StreetEasy, Zillow and The New York Times have helped open up the market by gathering listing information from various real estate databases and making it easy for consumers to search for homes online. But many brokerages still display only the firm’s exclusive listings on their Web sites — either because they are focusing on selling their own properties or resigned to the fact that customers have migrated elsewhere to research what is on the market.
Other brokerage firms are getting into the digital game themselves, creating a “virtual office Web site” or VOW. These are sites operated by brokers that enable clients to search for most of the available properties in a particular market, not just the firm’s exclusive listings.
While brokers have mixed feelings about whether these sites are worth the investment, the emergence of the VOW is yet another sign that once tightly guarded listing information has finally been set free in New York.
“Five years ago, protecting listings was the single most important thing, and people were very selective about where their listings ended up,” said Eric Gordon, the managing director of RealPlus, which develops VOWs for clients as well as operating the listings database used by members of the Real Estate Board of New York. “Now they want us to send their listings to every site we could possibly send them to. There are exceptions, but in general, the feeling is, ‘just get our listings out there as quickly and efficiently as possible.’ ”
The virtual office Web site concept was spurred by a 2008 settlement between the Justice Department and the National Association of Realtors, which forced brokerages to share listing data with their rivals, including Internet-based firms that offer rebates or other discounts to buyers willing to do most of the legwork to find a home.
In most parts of the country, brokers share information about properties through a multiple listing service, or M.L.S., a database operated by a real estate association on behalf of its members. Although Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx each have a multiple listing service, many agents in New York City are not members and instead participate in a similar service managed by the Real Estate Board of New York, called R.L.S.
Agents who belong to these services are typically required to share property information with other brokers within a day or two of signing an exclusive listing, and these databases now share listings with each other as well as sites like StreetEasy, The New York Times, and hundreds of national and international portals like Yahoo and Google.
Sites like StreetEasy have free rein to publish listing information online for customers to search, aggregating data from various sources to create fairly comprehensive databases of properties available in New York City, including homes for sale by owner. But if brokerages want to post other firms’ listings on their Web sites, they must go through the process of becoming a virtual office Web site.
For prospective buyers the main difference between a VOW and other real estate search sites is that a VOW has to adhere to rules dictated by the Justice Department settlement, including a requirement that customers register with a name, an e-mail address and a password before they can search for listings.
Required registration can be a turn-off, some agents say, especially for casual shoppers.
“The problem I have with VOWs is that they force you to register before you can get information about properties,” said Douglas Heddings, the president of the Heddings Property Group. “To me it seems like a step backward, in that it’s holding the information hostage.”
Although the Heddings Property Group was one of the first firms in New York City to create a virtual office Web site just last year, Mr. Heddings said he was planning to abandon it in favor of a partnership with Buyfolio, a company that allows agents and their customers to search for listings as well as share feedback about properties.
For Buyfolio, a relatively new company focusing on the New York market, these collaboration tools are a key selling point. But now that real estate brokerages, technology start-ups like StreetEasy and media companies like The New York Times all have access to the same basic data about listings, the competition to attract buyers searching for homes online is heating up.
“You’ve still got to bring people to your Web site,” said Steven Spinola, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, or Rebny. “Just creating a VOW doesn’t mean people are going to come and use it.”
So far, 98 of the 484 residential brokerage firms that are members of Rebny have created a virtual office Web site, Mr. Spinola said. This involves paying a fee to have the board audit the site to ensure it complies with the standards, like how client registration is handled and how listings data is managed.
But when the board recently overhauled its own Web site, now called NY1Residential.com, it partnered with the local news channel NY1 and decided not to create a VOW, partly to avoid the registration requirement.
“We made a decision that we weren’t going to ask people to sign in,” Mr. Spinola said. “It was just the sense of the members that they wanted to keep it an open Web site that anyone could search.”
Among New York City real estate firms, there are mixed feelings about whether a VOW delivers enough benefits to justify either the cost of creating one or the trade-offs involved in complying with rules about how these sites interact with clients.
After signing up for a VOW, customers have to wait for an e-mail to confirm that they have registered, and must also agree to terms and conditions that can run as long as a dozen pages. Those terms typically include an acknowledgment that the customer is entering into a lawful consumer-broker relationship with the agency, legally required language that does not obligate the buyer to work with the agency. This can seem like overkill just to search for, say, two-bedroom apartments in Chelsea.
But some brokerages are wagering that the hurdles are worth jumping, that there is money to be made from providing clients with a comprehensive set of properties rather than just the firm’s own listings, the traditional practice. Most VOWs also include tracking features that allow the agency to monitor customers’ searches, potentially producing useful data about what clients are looking for online.
“It was complicated to become a VOW, and it was costly,” said Dottie Herman, the president of Prudential Douglas Elliman. But, she said, the company’s Web site is more client-friendly now, allowing searches for properties in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, the Hamptons and Westchester County, including listings from other firms.
As for the registration requirement, Ms. Herman said she would have preferred that it be optional, but she doesn’t view it as a major deterrent. “I think most people don’t have a problem with it, because everybody asks for your e-mail address today,” she said.
Visitors to the Prudential Douglas Elliman site, once they have signed up, can search, sort and save listings. Results are displayed with the firm’s exclusive listings first, then those of other firms. But unlike, say StreetEasy, there is no direct link to the other firm’s site.
Bellmarc Realty is another big firm that is embracing the virtual office approach. Neil Binder, the president of Bellmarc, said that after experimenting with allowing individual agents to offer a VOW, generally using third-party software, the firm decided to develop a company-wide site instead, which will debut once it gets Rebny’s approval.
Mr. Binder said that the Bellmarc agents who tried VOWs created by third-party vendors did not find they generated much business, but he believes the new VOW will be more effective.
“It’s going to be more of an evaluation tool than an information tool,” Mr. Binder said. “I’m trying to create a process of comparison to show how properties stand up next to each other.”
Other large firms in the city are taking a wait-and-see approach. Diane M. Ramirez, the president of Halstead Property, said that about a quarter of the company’s agents had incorporated a VOW into their individual pages, but that Halstead had not developed one for its corporate site.
Corcoran has not jumped on the VOW bandwagon at all, said Pamela Liebman, the company’s president, partly because listing information is already widely available and partly because of doubts about VOWs.
“We’ve watched the traffic of some of the firms that have put VOWs on their site, and from what we can see it hasn’t increased,” Ms. Liebman said, adding that Corcoran also had not experienced an uptick in the number of deals it is doing with buyers’ brokers who have virtual office Web sites.
Beyond basic listing data, real estate Web sites compete for buyers, and page views, by offering additional information: price histories, recorded sales, building details and school district data — as well as discussion forums, mapping tools and features that make it easier to search for homes and then sort the results.
Zillow and The New York Times offer real estate apps for mobile devices, and these mobile users now account for a third of Zillow’s traffic on weekends, said Amy Bohutinsky, the company’s chief marketing officer, a trend that could put VOWs at a disadvantage as more people embrace smartphones.
However, brokers say they are not trying to compete with these sites, which are viewed more as information distributors than rivals, especially at a time when so much data has been digitally set free.
“Now listings are all over the place — all that information is published by a million different sites,” Ms. Herman said. “This is the world we’re in today, and if you don’t embrace change I don’t think you can be in business.”
-via NYTimes
American Hotspots According to Non-Americans
Are international house hunters looking for a piece of the American Dream in your city? Most likely if you live in the Sunshine State.
America is often called the land of opportunity, but these days, it might be more accurate to describe us as the land of dirt-cheap real estate. In the past 12 months, American home sellers cut about $24 billion from the homes they’ve listed on Trulia, of which a staggering $3 billion was slashed in Florida. Meanwhile, word on the street is – international buyers spent a whopping $41 billion last year to snap up U.S. homes left and right. Given this fun fact, we thought it’d be pretty fascinating to see where global house hunters are looking. The results will surprise you.
Florida, Not Just For American Retirees and Tourists
Right now, global house hunters make up about 5% of the window shopping that happens on Trulia. Aside from the usual suspects (e.g., Los Angeles, New York City and San Francisco), we saw a ton of interest in Florida … hmm?What’s wrong with that you ask? Call us crazy, but it’s a bit shocking to see Naples and Kissimmee on the same list as Beverly Hills, Chicago and Honolulu.
In fact, 10 out of the 24 most popular American cities that have caught the eye of international homebuyers are in Florida – check it out for yourself. And yes, this list is based on popularity. That’s right, there’s more interest in Cape Coral than in Miami.
# Most Popular Florida Cities 1. Cape Coral, FL 2. Miami, FL 3. Fort Lauderdale, FL 4. Naples, FL 5. Fort Myers, FL 6. Miami Beach, FL 7. Kissimmee, FL 8. Orlando, FL 9. Jacksonville, FL 10. Tampa, FL Reportedly, Canadians, Europeans and Brazilians spent about $13 billion on homes in Florida last year. But what gives – are the oranges really that good? We can’t say for sure, but what we do know is that the houses in Florida are being sold at a super discount. Oddly, this blue light special is also happening in Arizona, but last time we checked, the interest in Phoenix and Tucson is pretty tiny. Just to throw it out there, but maybe, just maybe, this is because Florida might be perceived as as being friendlier to non-citizens.
So who wants to move to Florida? With the exception of Brazil, let’s just say that most of these global window shoppers hail from the northern hemisphere and/or across the pond (as in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Russia, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands). Judging by our findings, this interest from abroad isn’t slowing down and may be the jolt that revives the Sunshine State’s struggling housing market.
America’s Next Top Expat Community
Now, let’s talk about the usual suspects. Of the 1.4 million global house hunters looking (on Trulia that is) to buy a piece of the American Dream, most are eyeing La La Land aka Los Angeles. Guess when it comes to “California dreamin,” everyone from the British and Australians to the Chinese and the Brazilians want to be part of Hollywood. More specifically, the British and the Australians would especially love a 90210 zip code since Beverly Hills is on each of their top 5 U.S. cities lists.Another interesting, though hardly shocking, migration trend that we saw was in Mexico. Most of these house hunters currently living south of the border aren’t looking that far beyond the border with El Paso, San Diego and Chula Vista at the top of their list – no further commentary here.
One anomaly that we’re still scratching our heads about is Australia and Detroit. Right now, Detroit is #5 on Australia’s top 5 U.S. cities list. Aussies must really love Robocop (it’s rumored that they’re building a statue in honor of this 80s movie icon) or they must be really into techno (’cause as we all know, Detroit didn’t just give birth to Motown, they also gave us electronic music without words). Another theory that we’re toying with is that it’s also possible that the folks down under just love picking up homes for $40K a pop.
All in all, if our findings are any indication, America’s real estate market may be a driving force in either making us the world’s second home or an even more multicultural community.
Real estate information marketplace Zillow® today expanded and improved its living database of homes, adding more than 25 million new Zestimate® home valuations and improving Zestimate accuracy nationwide. Zillow now has data, Zestimates and Rent Zestimates on approximately 100 million homes – more than three-quarters of all homes in the United States.
In the past five years, Zillow users have submitted information on more than 28 million homes, adding updates, such as remodel or home fact information, that are not reflected in public records. This gives Zillow an inimitable database of nearly every home in the country, and creates unique home profiles that allow Zillow to calculate more accurate Zestimates on more homes. The new Zestimate algorithms launched today incorporate more of this user-submitted data, among other changes.
The expansion brings Zestimates to homeowners, buyers and sellers in states like Iowa and New Hampshire, where Zestimates were not widely available. The Zestimate median margin of error is now 8.5 percent nationwide, and below 6 percent in major metropolitan areas such as Denver, San Diego and Washington D.C.
"At Zillow, we have an unwavering commitment to give people as much free information about real estate and homes as possible, and Zestimate home valuations are a big part of that," said Zillow Chief Economist Stan Humphries. "We've spent six years cultivating our database of nearly all homes, creating a unique and living entity that combines public record data with information submitted by Zillow users on more than 28 million properties. By expanding the Zestimate algorithm to include more data points and new modeling approaches, we have been able to expand Zillow's footprint and improve accuracy. We are thrilled to offer this resource to even more consumers and professionals across the country."
Zillow launched Zillow.com in 2006, with Zestimates on more than 40 million U.S. homes. Since then, Zillow has more than doubled Zestimate coverage nationwide, added 100 million Rent Zestimates, and made significant improvements to the breadth and accuracy of data. Zestimates are a starting point in determining a home's value; together with a home's value range, comparable recent sales, and current listings, Zillow's information helps consumers gain an edge in real estate and make more informed decisions. Zestimates and other home information can also be found on Zillow Mobile, the most popular platform of mobile real estate applications across iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry.
Zillow's Zestimate accuracy is published on its website, and updated every three months. More information is available at http://www.zillow.com/howto/DataCoverageZestimateAccuracy.htm.
